Confusions in filmland about 16x9

[David Mullen ASC]

The trouble with true 1.37 Academy is that so few first-run theaters can or will show it. They don't have the extra lens needed. If you simply pulled the 1.85 mask and replaced it with a 1.37 Academy mask, the image is too tall for most screens.

 

This leaves 1.37 Academy to be shown correctly only at art house cinemas, archives, and museum theaters.

 

I remember when the new release of "Wizard of Oz" came out, Technicolor (after the "Gone with the Wind" 1.37-on-anamorphic dye transfer print debacle) released true 1.37 Academy prints using their dye transfer process and "1.37 reduced optically to fit in 1.85" Kodak prints -- and only theaters that said they could project true 1.37 Academy could rent the dye transfer prints. I think they made only 50 of those prints; I got to see it at the Westwood Mann National, which I wouldn't have thought was equipped to show true 1.37 Academy (but I guess between the several Westwood Mann theaters, they had the right lens...)

[Adam Frisch FSF]

This is turning in to a war of aspect ratios. That wasn't my intention. I love scope and have

shot my fair share of it. I do like 16x9 framing on a 16x9 TV and so on. For the big screen

I've always been a sucker for cinemascope, the wider the better.

 

I'm just fighting the fight of letting 4x3 be 4x3 on 4x3 TV at times. Or at least not be looked

as a pervert for suggesting to shoot in it...

[John Sprung]

The trouble with true 1.37 Academy is that so few first-run theaters can or will show it. They don't have the extra lens needed.

For previews and premieres our feature division sends out a projection engineer with a kit of lenses and even fresh xenon lamps. It's kinda like you can borrow my car, but you gotta give it a tune-up first. If somebody really wanted to do a proper 1.37 release, they'd have to supply plates and lenses along with a tech to put them in.

 

 

 

-- J.S.

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

I'd be surprised if most cinemas didn't have someone competent to set up a new lens. We did.

 

Phil

[John Pytlak RIP]

In addition to the release of "pillarboxed" Academy 1.37:1 prints of "The Wizard of Oz" and "Gone With the Wind", other recent features that used 1.85:1 "pillarboxing" within the 2.39:1 "scope" frame for at least a portion of the running time were "Brother Bear" and "The Horse Whisperer". Caleb Deschanel changed aspect ratio within the story for "More American Graffiti":

 

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079576/technical

 

As mentioned, most multiplex theatres are equipped only for the 1.85:1 "flat" and 2.39:1 "scope" formats, and would need help in choosing lenses, aperture plates and screen masking settings for proper presentation of 1.37:1 "Academy" format.

[John Sprung]

Hi,

 

I'd be surprised if most cinemas didn't have someone competent to set up a new lens. We did.

 

Phil

Here the chains generally have only one engineer for dozens to hundreds of screens. I can ask the projection guys if you want a more exact number.

 

 

-- J.S.

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

...jeez. Perhaps we're lucky to have an ex-telecine engineer on staff!

 

Phil

[Jesse Bekas]

Obviously, much of the reason many people (the non-professional public) like 16:9 so much more than 4:3, is that they have been programmed by public theaters to expect 16:9 as being of the highest quality, as if 4:3 television programs are of a lower quality. While professionals realize this is untrue, we must try to appeal to the largest audience to be as fiscally successful as possible. This is similar to the way everybody goes nuts for 24P, when in fact 30P is probably a better format/frame rate.

 

However, one actual advantage 16:9 has over 4:3, is that it more realistically recreates the aspect ratio of human vision.

 

The funny thing about that is when people discuss the "real" look of 60i, vs. the "narrative" or "fantasy" look of 24P. Now we should say that the "real" look would be 60i, 16:9, and the "fantasy" look would be 24P, 4:3!

[John Sprung]

The funny thing about that is when people discuss the "real" look of 60i, ....

30 and 60 are oddball numbers that only exist in the NTSC, and now unfortunately, ATSC, television systems (OK, and PAL-M in Brazil). Film and all the rest of the TV in the world are compatible, operating at 24/25, and converting between them by running a little fast or slow. The oddball 30/60 numbers are the cause of the whole 3-2 pulldown mess. The right way to go to higher frame rates is to use integer multiples of 24, the best choice being 72.

 

HDTV production here is 1080p/24 because we can sell 24 to the domestic market, and we can't sell 30/60i to the foreign markets. Foreign sales are about half the revenue for a show, so only a very few limited market shows can afford to exist without it.

 

As for interlace, that's another long dreary discussion. It's basically an analog cathode ray tube dinosaur that should have died when we went digital. Interlace artifacts ... nah, I really don't want to get started on that again.

 

 

 

-- J.S.

[Laurent Andrieux]

as to go back to adam's sad experience, I think that if you wanted the film to be in 4:3, may be you should have better shoot in regular 16... I remember a short we made in regular 35, print full frame, but was framed 1.85. (because the rental couldn't give us a 1.85 aperture plate) It's been hard to have a 1.85 master positive !

 

You get less trouble when there is no choice but to respect your work

 

In France, we consider super 16 as 1.66 aspect ratio.

 

I quit working about 5 years ago as I now teach and I realize that this problem of aspect ratios considering shoot and post is becoming a problem because of the risks of quality loss if done by people who don't let their mind work.

 

I guess some guys don't want to work some way just because they're not used to it.

 

Your first point "don't mistake s16 is not 16:9" makes it clear.

 

The fact that we make images that some people want to broadcast different ways creates a risk of non respect towards creators work.

 

The point is not "is 4:3 nicer/whatever than 16:9 or the other hand ?" but, to respect the works some people took the risk to produce.

 

Is there some good data link - Mr Pylak ? - or should we create it ? SMPTE ? to the different post procedures and format choices that just respect the work all the way thru ?

 

(16:9 was made because people wanted it - there has been commercial studies about that before it showed up - why not ?) But how comes this new format generates such a problem ? (because they can squeeze 4:3 and this bullshit) how comes it's becoming a danger for creation ? That is the f******* prblem !

[Jesse Bekas]

Oh, John, you're right. My comments were not directed toward the PAL system, just the convoluted NTSC. Really, what if any advantage is there of using interlacing (besides compatability with past formats)? Why is there a HiDef interlaced format?

 

(if this is too off topic, feel free to tell me to save the interlace/progressive, NTSC/PAL topic for another thread)

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

Well, interlaced video does create a perceptually more accurate representation of reality than 24p, which I think is the entire point of using 24p for dramatic work. It's particularly useful for things like sports events, where you need to be able to see the ball move very quickly.

 

Phil

[John Sprung]

Hi,

 

Well, interlaced video does create a perceptually more accurate representation of reality than 24p, which I think is the entire point of using 24p for dramatic work. It's particularly useful for things like sports events, where you need to be able to see the ball move very quickly.

 

Phil

So you'd rather look at 1080/60i than 1080/60p?

 

 

-- J.S.

[Matt Wells]

One of the main reasons scope came along was to entice people back into the cinema and away from their newly acquired television sets.

 

We are seeing, to an extent, a similar strategy with regard to "widescreen" televisions. The chief objective is commercial and to sell more televisions in a market saturated with 4X3 TV's.

 

However the public at large have no concept of how these different aspect ratios work. A friend was complaining the other day that a movie they were watching on their new 16X9 TV was letterboxed.

 

There was an advert recently before the European Football Championships "get your new widescreen TV ready for the football" when it was broadcast in 4X3.

 

In the UK the majority of people, at present, watch analogue terrestial television. The figure I heard quoted the other day on Radio 4 was 7 million people having access to digital sattelite or other digital TV.

 

My own view on the 4X3 frame is that I think that it is suddenly going to become fashionable again, and I personally like it very much. I feel the 16x9 ratio will suddenly seem very passe.

 

Matt

[Matt Wells]

Another thing I have noticed too is that Analogue terrestial TV has a much sharper picture than digital sattelite or other digital.

 

I know that this is probably not supposed to be the case, but there is a noticable difference.

 

Matt

[J. Lamar King IMPOSTOR]

This sounds like a classic disagreement between the artist and the business. The artist wants to shoot 4:3 for artistic reasons and the business wants 16:9 for distribution reasons. I can sympathize with Adam, because there is a lot of misunderstanding out there about aspect ratios. Many people don't realize camera gate aspect ratios have nothing to do with projection/display aspect ratios.

 

I would think you would want to use whatever frame protection scheme gives you the most consistent look among all of the release formats. I would want to compose for a 4:3 action area inside of a 16:9 frame so there would be a common top, rather than having a hairline on 4:3 and a browline on 16:9. But I see the contrary quite often on Letterboxed to 16:9, 4:3 TV. I'm assuming at some point this will stop and we will see better composed 16:9 frames.

 

16:9 TV format is here to stay which I like because it's closer to the cinema format. I would rather have the screen realestate filled with image than bars. Though I do hope it becomes acceptable to shoot 4:3 pillarbox if you want to. I think people are rediscovering that the 4:3 format can be a unique and quite beautiful one. I have a 6X7cm still camera and I've learned to love that format. It's good for making graphically strong compostions with squares, triangles and circles that interact strongly with the frame. Whereas 16:9 format is better with a more linear composition style.

 

Recently there was a car commercial (I believe) where it was just a bunch of naratively unrelated shots but all of them had a strong square subject. It was a perfect use of 4:3 compostion. It allows you to contrast a massive square building to a small square sponge or whatever. That commercial would not have the same impact in 16:9.

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

> So you'd rather look at 1080/60i than 1080/60p?

 

Depends on the situation, obviously.

 

If I'm trying to follow a fast-moving object for practical reasons, such as the ball in a game of tennis, yes, because the interlaced variant will always have subjectively higher temporal accuracy. Not that I think it'd make an awful lot of difference at 60fps anyway.

 

Feature films are probably better at 24p, if only because we're used to it.

 

Phil

[Adam Frisch FSF]

That's what I feel too, 4x3 is - swamped in a widescreen world - a very viable creative

choice again. I've never come across an aspect ratio hated by so many. Weird.

[John Pytlak RIP]

The aspect ratio should be an artistic choice, the one that best fits the project. Unfortunately, theatre screens and television screens can only accomodate a handful of standardized aspect ratios.

 

For theatrical release, there is certainly precedent in using any portion of the "scope" 2.39:1 frame, as Caleb Deschanel did in "More American Graffiti":

 

http://imdb.com/title/tt0079576/technical

 

Film negative format (mm/video inches)

35 mm

 

Cinematographic process

Panavision (anamorphic) (partly)

Spherical (partly)

 

Printed film format

35 mm (anamorphic)

 

Aspect ratio

1.37 : 1 (partly)

1.85 : 1 (partly)

2.35 : 1 (partly)

[John Sprung]

Hi,

 

> So you'd rather look at 1080/60i than 1080/60p?

 

Depends on the situation, obviously.

 

If I'm trying to follow a fast-moving object for practical reasons, such as the ball in a game of tennis, yes, because the interlaced variant will always have subjectively higher temporal accuracy. Not that I think it'd make an awful lot of difference at 60fps anyway.

 

Feature films are probably better at 24p, if only because we're used to it.

 

Phil

Can you explain how 60i gives you better temporal accuracy than 60p?

 

 

 

-- J.S.

[David Mullen ASC]

60P would be the same temporal accuracy as 60i.

 

Usually the choice for HD is not 60P versus 60i, it's 24P/25P/30P versus 50i or 60i, with the idea that most HD broadcasting is 60i. So when it comes to sports, the "live" feeling of 60i is generally preferable to the look of progressive scan capture at "low" frame rates (24 to 30).

 

But given a choice between shooting 1080/60i versus 720/60P (because 1080/60P is not yet a practical choice), both shown at 1080/60i for broadcast, I would think they would look similar. Shown on a progressive-scan HD display system with a high refresh rate, I'd assume the 720/60P would look better than 1080/60i for the lack of interlace-scan artifacts. But maybe they'd look similar again.

 

Anyway, the point is that fast-moving action like sports is better shot at high sampling rates (60P, 60i, whatever) as long as a "film look" isn't required.

[Manu Anand]

Recently Shot this short film which was a visual recreation of a certain historical event in India.

 

Before the shoot i proposed to the director to shoot 16*9 on the DSR570 which was in her budget and i felt it would be better and more suitable to the visuals we had in mind.

 

She agrees and even loves the 16*9 look and raves about the footage.

 

BUT then she is the one who is editing it as well

 

Suddenly i get a frantic phone call

" you never told me about loss of quality etc etc in 16*9. i spoke to so and so he says how could i have done such a thing shooting in 16*9 etc etc"

 

I try to explain to her that what we did will not cause any loss of quality... about true 16*9 etc etc

I try real hard to convince her but she wont listen to me coz she spoke to so and so director who had a real hard time with 16*9 footage .

I goto her studio take out her FCP manual and show her the relevant paragraphs she still wont listen. She just wont listen.

 

This happened because not many people shoot 16*9 here and as this project was not for television i didnt see the need to restrain myself by 4:3 because i felt the story would be better told with the wider format.

 

Anyway finally after almost a week she realised somehow that the director she had spoken to had had problems coz like her his editor had no clue about 16*9.

 

This happens because ive noticed directors, not knowing the technicality of certain things just get paranoid real fast and then would only listen to other directors.

 

Well it worked out fine after my Director/Editor saw the light :)

 

Manu Anand

New Delhi

[John Sprung]

60P would be the same temporal accuracy as 60i. ....

 

Shown on a progressive-scan HD display system with a high refresh rate, I'd assume the 720/60P would look better than 1080/60i for the lack of interlace-scan artifacts. But maybe they'd look similar again.

Yes, exactly. 60 samples per second is the exact same temporal resolution in both cases. I just didn't want to be the only one beating that drum.

 

The 1080/60i vs 720/60p comparison is an interesting one, because they both take pretty much the same number of bits per second to transmit. 1080i is 1,036,800 pixels per second, 720p is 921,600 pixels per second. The big difference is in how they handle spatial resolution, which is a large part of what determines the sharpness of a picture.

 

720p is 1280 pixels wide by 720 high, and 1280:720 = 16:9, so the pixels are "square" -- the format has equal horizontal and vertical resolution. 1080p, likewise, is a square pixel format. But 1080i is (at least in theory) 1920 wide by 540 high in each field. What does that mean for vertical resolution?

 

Well, if you tried to make interlace as sharp as progressive, the result is absolutely unwatchable. You get eye-hammering small area flicker. Bill Schreiber at MIT did some demonstrations of this. You can get rid of the flicker completely by filtering down vertical resolution to 0.5 times that of the full line count, but in that case, you gain no sharpness at all from using interlace. The reason the analog TV systems used it was that you can cheat that number -- called the Kell factor -- up a little bit. Somewhere around 0.6 to 0.65 seems to be the best compromise between gaining some sharpness and being annoyed by flicker. 0.7 is too much flicker.

 

Using a Kell factor of 0.65, 1080i would be equivalent to 1080 x 0.65 = 702p.But since 1920 x 1080 is square pixels, this 1920 x 702 would have more horizontal resolution than vertical resolution.

 

What happens when horizontal and vertical resolution are different is that up to a ratio of about 2:1, the human visual system accepts the picture as having the lower of the two resolutions. Much over 2:1 and the untrained observer begins to notice that the tops and bottoms of things aren't as sharp as the sides, or vice versa. Therefore, 1080i is pretty much equivalent to 1248 x 702p. You get just slightly less sharpness for just slightly more bit rate. (This is also what underlies Sony's decision to filter 1920 wide down to 1440 before running the DCT compression on the signal in HDcam. You really can't see the difference in 1080i.)

 

Without going to even more excessive length, the other issue with interlace is that the absence of samples in alternate fields really raises hob with MPEG compression. Interlace is in effect a crude form of lossy compression whose only virtue is that it can be done in analog systems. Compression removes redundancy. Modern digital methods can remove more redundancy with less harm to the picture than interlace, but they don't work as well if interlace got there first and hacked away some of the data they need to work with.

 

So, bottom line, interlace is a thing of the devil, and we need to sharpen up that oak stake to drive thru its heart. ;-)

 

 

 

-- J.S.